Beyond the Flying Geese: What the 15th Five-Year Plan Means for Africa, Europe and the World

Asked to identify the defining foreign policy moment of 2025, the likely temptation is to look for a rupture — a summit that failed or a treaty that was signed between states opposed on the geopolitical spectrum.

For me, however, the defining moment was more akin to an internal perspective shift. Let me explain.

Last September, I visited China for the first time. It was during the week of the 80th Victory Day celebrations. I was in Beijing primarily to speak at the Sino-German Forum for Sustainable Development organised by the Sino-German Center for Sustainable Development (CSD), a joint initiative of Germany’s BMZ and China’s MofCom.

But I spent the week engaging with as many people as possible — from giving a lecture to students of the Peking University Center for African Studies (PKUCAS) to exchanging with academics across three universities, and also speaking with think tankers and discussing with diplomats.

As a social scientist and think tanker, I am wary of the "taxi driver" approach to analysis - the tendency to diagnose a nation’s health based on fleeting anecdotes, a very common and much caricaturised form of which consists of conversations with a taxi driver to and from international airports. It is a discourtesy often paid to African countries and I was determined not to view China through that same reductive lens.

In short, I did not want to understand China’s progress by looking at how closely it mimicked — or not — the West. I wanted to find ways to understand it on its own terms. And I saw a lot that I am still processing.

My thinking is this: We are not watching a system that is trying to be Western. We are watching a system that is succeeding at being distinct, challenging all sorts of assumptions in the process. A system that is reimagining and consolidating on its geoeconomic niche.

The economic implications of this are profound. It invites us to question received wisdoms, including the “Flying Geese” model of development. For decades, this theory has been deployed in analysing the rhythm of global growth. It goes something like this: an economically transformed nation assumes a global leading role (e.g. Japan or South Korea) and advances into high-tech sectors, it supposedly sheds its low-end manufacturing jobs to following nations, creating a v-formation of development.

Conventional wisdom therefore holds that as China moves up the value chain into advanced manufacturing such as robotics and advanced lithography and AI, it will shed low-end manufacturing sectors to the rest of the developing world.

The framework of the 15th Five-Year Plan, which was circulating in the background as I took long walks in Beijing, challenges this assumption. The strategic ambition emerging from Beijing signals a clear intent to advance its mastery of emerging technologies underpinning the future economy of green tech and AI, without relinquishing its current position as the factory of the world.

Through the deployment of what Chinese policymakers have termed “New Quality Productive Forces” as far back as 2024, China appears to be choosing to upgrade and automate traditional industries with high-tech rather than exiting them. It wishes to operate at both the highest and lowest levels of the global production hierarchy, and not just fly in the rarefied — and often limited — realm of an economic superpower.

In 2026, I want to test this hypothesis. We need to map China’s trajectory to see if the Five-Year Plans will reveal different, perhaps unexpected, openings for the Global South.

For Europe, the implications of this analysis carry potential existential weight, especially as the continent faces intense geopolitical and geoeconomic pressures elsewhere. An analysis of China’s plans is essential for identifying concrete options regarding how Europe can revitalise its own industries.

I suspect this analysis will demonstrate just how much closer Europe needs to work with African countries. Think of it as a closing of the gap between rhetoric and reality born of necessity. But the shape of that relationship will depend entirely on a precise reading of China’s next move.

That internal perspective shift I experienced in Beijing is just the starting point; now I want to look at the data to see where they lead.

About the Author

Dr. Olumide Abimbola

Dr. Olumide Abimbola is Executive Director of APRI - Africa Policy Research Institute, a Berlin-based think tank. He previously worked on trade and regional integration at the African Development Bank, and on natural resources governance at the GIZ.